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Jackobs: Forging a new career path requires training and support

Jackobs: Forging a new career path requires training and support

There are many interesting and insightful people in the Central Texas business community. On Sundays, the American-Statesman business team brings you in-depth interviews with some of them, focusing on topics that matter to our community. To nominate someone for the Statesman Sunday Interview, email Statesman business editor Barry Harrell at bharrell@statesman.com.

Representatives from Austin Interfaith and the local business community founded Capital IDEA in 1998, and Steven Jackobs has been heading the organization ever since. Under his direction, the group has helped support, train and find careers for hundreds of Central Texas workers and their families.

Capital IDEA – the IDEA stands for Investing in Development and Employment of Adults – works closely with unemployed or underemployed workers to identify a viable and fruitful career path. It’s a rigorous process that’s design to ensure that workers are committed to the training and completing it.

Those who do enter the program get not only skills training, but support for a wide variety of the barriers life can throw in the way, including transportation and child care needs.

Jackobs, the organization’s executive director, was recognized for his efforts in 2007, when he won the Ernst & Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year award for Central Texas. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree from the University of Sussex in England.

The American-Statesman asked him about the Capital IDEA program, broader job training efforts, and what Austin can do to help workers move into better-paying, more meaningful careers:

American-Statesman: About how many clients does Capital IDEA have at any given time, and how do you go about recruiting applications and filtering them to make sure you get the right fit for your programs?

Jackobs: We currently support about 650 low-income adults. People find out about us through the congregations of Austin Interfaith, friends and family, and social service agencies, and go through a six-week “screening-in” process. First they explore the careers our employer partners offer. Next we measure their baseline math and reading skills and assess their fit for their career of interest. Then together we develop a three or four-year financial and educational plan. The final and most important step is a heart-to-heart conversation about commitment to the plan and to give back once finished. We don’t often say ‘No,’ but we do say ‘Not yet,’ and help them develop a plan to get ready.

Those who do make it into the Capital IDEA programs get a lot of support services in addition to the skills training. What kinds of services do you provide, and why are those types of support services so important for your clients?

Capital IDEA’s most important service is a Career Navigator, who is a student’s guardian angel throughout their journey. I only half-joke that we get married to each other. Students meet weekly as a group with their Navigator and his or her responsibility is to get them successfully through their education and into a career, no matter what. Capital IDEA helps pay for or leverage with our partners tuition, fees, books, vaccinations, tools, exam fees, uniforms, child care, bus passes or gas money, credentials, and everything else short of bare living expenses. But the sauce that makes this barbecue is the mutual commitment between a Career Navigator and a student.

How can you fund both the training and support programs?

In the mid ‘90’s, Austin Interfaith worked with the City of Austin and Travis County to create an economic development fund from the tax abatement agreement with Samsung. This general revenue support has been critical because it fills the gaps left by traditional workforce development and higher education funding. Over the years, supporters have also stepped up to create additional private funds, such as the Whitlow Education Fund, which supports our students in Williamson County. Other donors include many of Austin’s tech entrepreneurs, such as the Sooch Foundation and the Topfer Family Foundation, as well as local employer partners, St. David’s Foundation, and many, many more foundations, companies, and individuals – even Capital IDEA graduates.

As of this writing, a handful of bills that would boost career and technical education (CTE) efforts are making their way through the Legislature. One bill would make more of those CTE programs available in high school, and another would create a Fast Start program that allows post-secondary students to move more quickly through training programs at public colleges. What’s your take on those bills? Do they complement or compete with Capital IDEA?

Anything that gets community college-quality CTE into the high schools helps reduce the future need for Capital IDEA. The Fast Start program would help us shorten the time necessary to earn a degree by enabling students to earn a college credit at a faster pace. Another State program of interest is the Jobs and Education for Texans Fund, created in the 2009 Legislature. Austin Interfaith and its sister organizations across the state are working with Rep. John Davis, Rep. Mike Villarreal, and Sen. Chuy Hinojosa to fine-tune the program to work more in sync with community-created efforts like Capital IDEA and our partnering community colleges.

If you could amend that legislation, what would you change?

Legislation needs to fund the full-on case management and counseling/advising of Career Navigators for non-traditional adults and other first-generation college students. If you don’t have a college-educated parent to guide you through the college maze, you really need someone like our Career Navigator to play a similar role.

From your perspective, what can Austin do to help make sure that more people are getting the skills they need to move into meaningful careers? What economic gaps do we need to fill?

There is huge opportunity in Austin in good-paying careers in technology, health care, biosciences, manufacturing and other industries. The new medical school and teaching hospital will only further increase the demand for skilled workers. There are roughly 38,000 working poor adults who tried college on their own without success, and tens of thousands more who have the fire in their belly to try but have not yet had the opportunity. If we can build a solid “career expressway” at ACC, we can transform these hard-working adults into the skilled workers that our local employers need. They will go from needing public assistance to contributing significantly to the local tax base. And these adults will help the next generation graduate from college without the need of Capital IDEA.